LIMERICK — Despite a recent federal court ruling invalidating a rule that would allow storage of radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods at nuclear power plants for 60 years after they’ve closed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no plans to consider the issue when deciding on whether to re-license Exelon Nuclear’s Limerick Generating Station for an additional 20 years.

Currently, the operating licenses on the plant’s two nuclear reactors expire Oct. 26, 2024, for Unit 1, and June 22, 2029, for Unit 2.

Exelon has submitted a request for a 20-year extension on both licenses. The NRDC has petitioned the Atomic Licensing and Safety Board, arguing, among other things, that the reactors should not be re-licensed without a new, site-specific environmental impact review.

Advertisement

Further, in addition to spent fuel being a non-issue for re-licensing for the NRC, the agency also does not consider the cost of long-term spent fuel rod storage when calculating how much it will cost to de-commission a nuclear plat at the end of its operation.

Both these facts were confirmed recently by NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

Spent fuel rods are what remains after the uranium pellets inside the fuel rods in a reactor no longer generate enough heat to create the steam that turns the turbines and generates electricity at a nuclear power plant.

Although cooler, this spent fuel remains radioactive to some extent for hundreds of years.

For years, spent fuel was kept in concrete “spent fuel pools” located inside a nuclear plant and filled with water to keep it from overheating.

Ultimately, spent fuel was destined for a national repository for all spent fuel rods beneath Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. The capacity at most of these pools was designed with the idea that the fuel would ultimately be moved there.

However, the Yucca Mountain project was plagued by decades of delays and cost over-runs and President Obama put a stop to the project and pulled the funding, appointing a blue ribbon commission to study the matter.

That decision was applauded by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat representing Nevada, who opposed the Yucca Mountain project.

But even before Obama’s decision, many of the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants older than Limerick had already reached their design capacity, and beyond, and began setting up “dry storage” canisters on-site.

At the Limerick plant, ground was broken in 2007 for a dry cask storage system that is now storing the plant’s older, colder spent fuel.

According to the NRDC filing, in 2008 NRC proposed “‘remov(ing) its expectation that a repository (for spent fuel) will be available by 2025’ and acknowledged that its previous finding that sufficient disposal capacity would be available within 30 years after any reactor’s licensed life ‘is not supportable.’”

“At the same time, the NRC also stated that it ‘retains confidence that spent fuel can be safely stored with no significant environmental impact until a repository can reasonably be expected to be available and that the Commission has a target date for the availability of the repository in that circumstance,’” the NRDC filing indicated.

In 2008, the NRC even proposed changing its regulations to allow the storage of spent fuel on-site at nuclear plants for a full 60 years after the plant had closed.

As a result of its confidence in the safety of spent fuel storage, NRC rules note that “no discussion of any environmental impact of spent fuel storage in reactor facility storage pools or independent spent fuel storage installations for the period following the term of the reactor operating license . . . is required in any environmental report, environmental impact statement, environmental assessment or other analysis prepared in connection with the issuance or amendment of an operating license for a nuclear reactor,” according to the NRDC filing.

According to the Associated Press, the June 8 federal court ruling overturned that rule, saying “on-site storage has been ‘optimistically labeled’ as temporary, but has stretched on for decades.”

“In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not fully evaluate the risks associated with long-term storage of nuclear waste,” AP reported.

The appeals court said the NRC should complete a detailed environmental review of on-site storage or explain why one is not needed, according to AP.

That decision dovetails into the NRDC legal effort to affect the course of Limerick’s license renewal request, arguing that the NRC should require an environmental review of the impacts of another 20 years of operation at the Sanatoga Road site.

Dana Melia, communications director for the Limerick Generating Station brushed aside NRDC’s argument, writing in a Friday email, “the contention aside, the DC Circuit Court decision in no way challenges Limerick’s legacy of safe and effective on-site spent fuel storage. The station continues to meet or exceeds all federal regulations related to on-site spent fuel storage and will continue to do so until a long-term storage solution is developed.”

Sheehan said last month that the NRC has not yet decided whether to appeal the appeals court ruling.

However, now-former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, addressed the subject in a farewell speech last week on the occasion of his resignation.

“Recently, the D.C. Court of Appeals informed the commission to go back and try again on our approach to dealing with that issue – particularly as to our environment approach. Fortunately, the commission was actually already on its way to doing this,” Jaczko said.

“The commission asked the staff to go forward with an environment review, looking at a longer time-frame about what kinds of challenges they could see with spent fuel and spent fuel storage. This court decision may just change the time-frame and the timing, and accelerate some of that work,” he said.

“Ultimately, I believe this is an issue that the Commission will have little difficulty addressing,” Jaczko concluded.

In addition to the court’s contention that NRC is not fully evaluating the risks of long-term spent fuel storage, the NRC has not fully evaluated the impact long-term storage of spent fuel will have on the cost of decommissioning nuclear plants — at least not all in the same place.

Every two years, the NRC requires that nuclear power plant operators update the agency on the funds and financial plans they have in place to de-commission plants and disassemble them once they are shut down and taken out of service.

Last year, NRC informed Exelon that its calculation showed a shortfall as of Dec. 31, 2010, in the amount needed to de-commission Limerick’s Unit 1 reactor, the older of the two at the Limerick plant.

“This was based on fund earnings (as specified under NRC regulations), a parent company guarantee and the company’s filing with the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission for a proposed cost adjustment to the collection of annual payments from ratepayers for decommissioning costs,” Sheehan explained in an e-mail Friday.

PECO collects money from ratepayers specifically for the purpose of building a fund to pay for de-commissioning the plant and one method available for covering the shortfall would have been to raise the rate charged to customers, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, Exelon Nuclear officials responded that Exelon, the parent company of Exelon Nuclear, would assure the estimated $639.1 million necessary to de-commission Unit 1.

That assurance was possible for a variety of reasons.

In Friday’s email, explaining NRC’s June 28 letter to Exelon accepting its method for guaranteeing the de-commissioning amount, Sheehan wrote, “you will see the amounts requested (from the PUC) by PECO in March 2012 are higher for Limerick Units 1 and 2, slightly less for Peach Bottom Unit 1, and zeroed out for Salem Unit 1 and 2.”

“However, Salem obtained license renewal, so they have an extra 20 years of potential earnings to add to the trust fund,” Sheehan said. “Under NRC rules, potential earnings can be used to reduce the amount of funds required from the ratepayers for those units.”

The end result is not a rate increase, as was considered possible, but a decrease in rates of two hundredths of a cent.

Paradoxically, while the NRC allows potential earnings from a re-licensed plant to be considered as a way to cover the costs of plant shut-down, it does not consider the potential for those added years of operation to generate additional spent fuel when calculating the cost of shutting the plant down.

“The funding for the storage of spent nuclear fuel is not part of the evaluation of decommissioning funds,” Sheehan said in a June 29 email.

He wrote that spent fuel is covered under a different regulation “which requires a plant owner to only submit a financial plan towards the funding of irradiated fuel into the future.”

“Some plant owners provide information for NRC staff evaluation that claims that there will be enough leftover decommissioning funds, after dismantlement work to NRC standards, to pay for storage of spent fuel,” Sheehan added.